At present, infusion of fluids into a patient is managed by medical personnel. Fluids are infused parenterally into a patient for a variety of reasons. It is often critical that the fluid being administered is infused into the patient's body in the required doses and flow rates.
This is usually done either manually using a roller clamp or automatically using an infusion pump. Manual roller clamps are inaccurate and are difficult to set to maintain an accurate flow rate. In addition, when applied to a length of plastics conduit, the plastics conduit itself may, in due course, plastically deform resulting in a loss of clamping action of the roller clamp. This could have the potentially serious consequences of an unregulated supply of fluid into the patient's body.
Infusion pumps, while maintaining an accurate flow rate, are expensive items. In addition, because an infusion pump is an electromechanical device, there is a risk of failure of the infusion pump which, once again, has potentially extremely serious consequences. Further, with the increasing age of the population there is more pressure for bed places in hospitals resulting in an increasing homecare market. Providing homecare patients with infusion pumps is expensive and has attendant risks as well. In addition, in large parts of the world, there are insufficient funds to make infusion pumps available to patients, whether in hospitals or in homecare.
Also, in the case of roller clamps, there is a continuous need for vigilance by medical personnel to ensure that the fluid is being infused at the desired flow rate. Often, in parts of the world, medical personnel are in short supply and are unable to provide the requisite duty of care.
A need therefore exists for a device which requires minimal human intervention, is not able to be tampered with, whether by the patient or by medical personnel, and which requires very little, if any, training or supervision to use.